Frequent readers of The Old Shug know that I'm an avid collector of vinyl records. I know a lot of people think that vinyl is a dead platform and that it doesn't stand up to the convenience and quality of digital music, but I honestly believe that if you listen to the same album on vinyl and CD you will have a much better experience with the vinyl copy. There are a few reasons that cause me to think this. I'll start out with the act of buying the album.If you are shopping for an album on CD then you go into a store with thousands of CD's and DVD's and you find a CD that you want to buy. But, before you make the purchase you want to know about it a little more just to be safe. So you ask an employee. Now I've generally had some pretty knowledgeable people working at the major CD stores but every once in a while you'll have someone who has no idea about the music and see's working at the store as just another retail job. Now, on the other hand if you're buying the album on vinyl you walk into the store that is filled with records and CD's you flip through the milk crates until you find that album you're looking for. You pull it out and you have this amazing 12 3/4 x 12 3/4 inch piece of art. At most record stores you'll only find one person working but you'll find this one person has an incredible amount of knowledge so when you ask him or her about the album they almost always can tell you something about it because if they sell records you know they have a passion for the music and it's not just a retail job for them.
So now you have the album and you're at home ready to open it. I'll admit that I get just as satisfied peeling off the plastic on a new CD as I do a new LP, but opening the two is a different story. When opening a CD there generally aren't any surprises unless it has an ad in it for other new CD's from that label. Opening a new vinyl record, on the other hand, can come with any number of surprises such as, posters, stickers, or in the case of many new records a digital download or a CD copy of the record.
Now... for the best part of all... Listening to the record. With the CD there are two different ways of going about this. You can either put it in a CD player, or do what most people do now-a-days which is upload it on their computers and putting it on their MP3 players. Then when all that is done you can put on/in your head/earphones and finally hit play. The main problem with this is that, with the whole portable aspect of my iPod, I end up doing something else and not focusing on my album. The vinyl copy is much more satisfying to me because once you have it opened you can take out the inner sleeve and slip the record out. Now you have this physical object that you can hold, and if you run your fingers along the grooves you can literally feel the music. Now for the moment you've been waiting for, you gently put the record on the platter and drop the needle. As soon as the needle catches you get this warm, genuine sound coming out of your speakers which keeps you hooked until the very end of the record which you now can enjoy as an experience instead of just a collection of songs.
Some of you might think that even though all that is nice and good don't CD's have better quality then records? Well, that's actually not necessarily true. Vinyl records are recorded in analog which means that it reflects the sound waves in one constant stream. Cd's are digital which is more like taking little "snapshots" of the sound. This causes a lot of sound to be lost in the final product of the recording which ends up giving CD's a more dull, flat sound compared to vinyl. (More info)
One of the biggest reasons I prefer vinyl is not a matter of personal taste or enjoyment, but a matter of respect for the artist. Vinyl ensures that you listen to the whole record and not just the singles or the songs that you've already heard. There is no skip button on a record player so you have to hear the whole record just the way that the artists made it and recorded it and just in case you do get distracted there are two sides on a record so you have to flip it which will get you right back into it.
I understand that maybe there are people reading this who aren't quite ready to make the jump all the way back to vinyl but if you liked this article I ask that instead of downloading single mislabeled songs off limewire you go to your local CD store and buy a whole CD instead to support the artists because that's what it all comes down too. We need to support the people making the music we like so that they can keep making new music for people to enjoy. and you never know, maybe someday you'll be at a yard sale and you'll pick up a record player for a couple bucks and join me and my fellow audiophiles.
Thanks for listening, keep on spinning
-Grant
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